by Nora Ephron
We will never be able to tell our children that we didn’t know it was happening. And what will we say when they ask what we did about it? Will we tell them the truth—that we were too busy?
—April 9, 2007
How to Foil a Terrorist Plot in Seven Simple Steps
In order to foil a terrorist plot, you must first find a terrorist plot. This is not easy.
Not just anyone can find and then foil a terrorist plot. You must have an incentive. The best incentive is to be an accused felon, looking at a long prison term. Under such circumstances, your lawyer will explain to you, you may be able to reduce your sentence by acting as an informant in a criminal case, preferably one involving terrorists.
The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material—a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled, or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States—you can make your very own terrorist.
Now the good part begins. Money! The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible targets and weapons that might be used in the impending terrorist attack that your very own terrorist is going to mastermind, with your help. It will even buy you a computer so you can go to Google Earth in order to show your very own terrorist a “top secret” aerial image of the target you have suggested.
More money!! The FBI will give you even more money to travel to foreign countries with your very own terrorist, and it will make suggestions about terrorist groups you can meet while in said foreign countries.
Months and even years will pass in this fashion, while you essentially get the FBI to pay for everything you do. (Incidentally, be sure your lawyer negotiates your expense account well in advance, or you may be forced—as the informant was in the Buffalo terrorist case—to protest your inadequate remuneration by setting yourself on fire in front of the White House.)
At a certain point, something will go wrong. You may have trouble recruiting other people to collaborate with your very own terrorist, who is, as you yourself know, just an ordinary guy in a really bad mood. Or, alternatively, the terrorist cell you have carefully cobbled together may malfunction and fail to move forward—probably as a result of sheer incompetence or of simply not having been genuinely serious about the acts of terrorism you were urging it to commit. At this point, you may worry that the FBI is going to realize that there isn’t much of a terrorist plot going on here at all, just a case of entrapment. Do not despair: the FBI is way ahead of you. The FBI knows perfectly well what’s going on. The FBI has as much at stake as you do. So before it can be obvious to the world that there’s no case, the FBI will arrest your very own terrorist, hold a press conference, and announce that a huge terrorist plot has been foiled. It will of course be forced to admit that this plot did not proceed beyond the preplanning stage, that no actual weapons or money were involved, and that the plot itself was “not technically feasible,” but that will not stop the story from becoming a front-page episode all over America and, within hours, boilerplate for all the Republican politicians who believe that you need to arrest a “homegrown” terrorist now and then to justify the continuing war in Iraq. Everyone will be happy, except for the schmuck you shmekeled into becoming a terrorist, and no one really cares about him anyway. So congratulations. You have foiled a terrorist plot. Way to go.
—June 4, 2007
My Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions
I JUST READ my New Year’s resolutions from last year, and I’m sorry to say that I managed to carry out almost none of them. I vowed to lose two pounds; I didn’t. I was going to cook a timballo; I didn’t. I promised myself I would leave America Online, and I almost succeeded, but after deciding where to go, I discovered that I couldn’t even get my own name as a handle, so that was pretty much that. Last year I even resolved to become a better human being, but then I promptly forgot all about it.
It’s discouraging that I couldn’t manage to carry out any of these resolutions, which are minimal and personal and easily achievable, to put it mildly, and it crossed my mind that perhaps my problem is that I’m aiming too low—I’m doing the traditional thing, which is to resolve to do something I have control over, as opposed to something that’s completely out of reach.
So here’s a list of my resolutions for 2008, which it seems to me I have as good a chance of carrying out as last year’s:
End the war in Iraq. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and I’m not talking about a slow withdrawal, I’m talking about just getting the hell out. This resolution involves my becoming Speaker of the House and majority leader of the Senate and whipping the entire Democratic membership of Congress into a brilliant frenzy of opposition that includes (but is not limited to) refusing to fund a penny more for the war.
Make sure a Democrat is elected president. Any Democrat. I wish it were going to be Chris Dodd, who would make a great president, but he doesn’t have a shot. But I’ll take anyone who’s running. And I promise to try not to find fault with the candidate, whoever he or she is, even though it will be hard and will probably require a personality transplant on my part.
In the meantime, while George Bush is still president, I will persuade him to get behind the threat of global warming. I plan to do this by slipping into the White House in the dead of night, tying the president naked to a bedpost, and forcing him to watch footage of the melting polar ice cap until he concedes.
Close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and then, in my capacity as special prosecutor, indict and convict all the American officials who condoned torture, from Rumsfeld on down.
Get William Kristol fired from the New York Times. I don’t think any actual work is going to be required in this area; this will come to pass as soon as he starts writing for the paper and whoever hired him actually reads his copy. But how did this happen? I have been watching this supercilious man smirk on Fox News for years, but it never crossed my mind that I would someday have to waste a perfectly good New Year’s resolution on him.
Kill Osama bin Laden. Everyone has almost forgotten about him, but I haven’t. I would send a SWAT team headed by Kiefer Sutherland and Matt Damon into Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever, and although the two of them would continually disagree about methods, they would eventually get their man.
Decide whether I would rather impeach Dick Cheney or Clarence Thomas. I always have a hard time figuring out which of these two I would rather do without, but this year I am definitely going to make a decision on the question, and there’s no telling what might happen once I do. At the moment I’m leaning toward Clarence Thomas, but that’s because I just read The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (which I highly recommend) and the Supreme Court is on my mind. (By the way, if I choose to impeach Clarence Thomas, my scenario includes another brave moment from the Democrats in Congress, who under my leadership refuse to approve Bush’s nominee to the Court and hold up the appointment until the next president is elected.)
Start a universal health care program and put Oprah Winfrey in charge of it. She can figure the whole thing out, and I, therefore, won’t have to.
Get the United States government to fund an endowment to lend money, interest-free, to anyone who wants to go to college, and to refinance (also interest-free) the college loans of all the adults who are walking around saddled with interest payments on their tuition debt. This might require my becoming education czar, which in turn would require my becoming involved in improving school lunches, which would be good for everyone involved, trust me.
Cook a timballo.
—January 1, 2008
Hooked on Hillary
I WOULD LIKE to put myself among the growing chorus of people demanding that Hillary Clinton withdraw from the election. I don’t really think it’s fair to ask her to withdraw, and I certainly don’t believe she’s going to; she’ll hang in
there ’til the last dog dies, or ’til she runs out of money, whichever comes first. I’m not asking her to withdraw because I prefer Obama, and I don’t think she should withdraw “for the sake of party unity,” or whatever current bromide is being flung at her to get her to pull out. I think she should withdraw because I’m losing my mind.
Don’t get me wrong, this primary election has been swell. Like Michelle Obama, I feel proud of my country for the first time in a long time. I loved Dennis Kucinich, and I had a big sneaker for Chris Dodd. But now that we’re down to two contenders, it’s turned into an unending last episode of Survivor. They’re eating rats and they’re frying bugs, and they’re frying rats and they’re eating bugs; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can’t take it anymore.
I am particularly sensitive to this because I’m a woman of a certain age, and this means that part of the pie that passes for my brain contains a large slice called Hillary. I’ve been thinking about her in a fairly pathological way ever since 1992 and dreaming about her as well. She is me, and then again she’s not. I used to love her and I no longer do, but unlike what usually happens when love dies, I still think about her far too much. When she tells a big lie, like her recent Bosnia episode, I can lose hours trying to figure out why. I mean, why? Was it one of those things that she’d said so often that she’d come to believe it? Was it a story that had worked in the past so she thought she’d gotten away with it? Did she honestly think that no one would rat her out? Does she not understand that if you’re famous, there’s almost nothing you do that someone doesn’t have a picture of? I have no idea what the answer is to any of this because I’m not a liar and she is. (By the way, I don’t think she was always a liar, the way some kids are born liars and never get over it. I think she was once a truthful person and her lying skills were forged in the early years of her marriage, forged in the crucible of Bill’s infidelities and in her role as point person in dealing with them. This is what happens when you marry a narcissist: he spills the milk, you clean it up, and your love grows. And then you end up a liar, just like him.)
But the point is that it doesn’t matter why Hillary lied; what matters is that I’m hooked on Hillary and on the Rorschach process that defines my relationship with her: she does something, I spend far too much time thinking about it, I superimpose my life and my choices onto hers, I decide how I feel about what she’s done, I bore friends witless with my theories, and then, instead of moving on, I’m confronted with yet another episode of her behavior and am forced to devote more hours to developing new theories about her behavior. I don’t have time for this.
I understand that asking Hillary to withdraw from the race has more to do with me than it does with her, but that’s my point.
—March 30, 2008
White Men
HERE’S ANOTHER THING I don’t like about this primary: now that there are only two Democratic candidates, it’s suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race. This may have always been true, but weeks ago it wasn’t so obvious—once upon a time there were eight candidates, and although six of them withered away, their presence in the campaign managed to obscure things. Even around the time of Ohio, when there were primarily three candidates, the outlines were murky, because Edwards was still in there, picking up votes from all sectors.
But now there are two and we’re facing Pennsylvania and whom are we kidding? This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder—after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)
To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal.
If Hillary pulls it out in Pennsylvania, and she could, and if she follows it up in Indiana, she can make a credible case that she deserves to be the candidate; these last primaries will show which of the two Democratic candidates is better at overcoming the bias of a vast chunk of the population that has never in its history had to vote for anyone but a candidate who could have been their father or their brother or their son, and that has never had to think of the president of the United States as anyone other than someone they might have been had circumstances been just slightly different.
Hillary’s case is not an attractive one, because what she’ll essentially be saying (and has been saying, although very carefully) is that she can attract more racist white male voters than Obama can. Nonetheless, and as I said, she has a case.
I spent the weekend listening to one commentator after another saying that Obama has it locked up, it’s a done deal. I dunno. Hillary is the true whack-a-mole and if she survives on Tuesday, it will be a whole new ball game. And it will be all because of white men. Plus ça change.
—April 20, 2008
It Ought to Be a Word
IT’S TRUE WHAT he said: we misunderestimated him.
George Bush came into his presidency with a huge wave of good will. Not from me, but from the others. An amazing number of people who should have known better thought of him as a charming guy whose intellectual limitations would somehow be as benign as Ronald Reagan’s, whose promise of a fairly passive presidency would be as survivable as Dwight Eisenhower’s. So he couldn’t seem to get a sentence out straight, so what? And as for his religious rigidity, that was simply his way of dealing with an alcohol problem without the sloppy conventions of AA.
He was misunderestimated in every way. It was hard to imagine that this feckless leader could do so much damage. But even as the worst emerged, he was given the benefit of the doubt because of the ongoing mysteries of his administration—mysteries that have remained unsolved in spite of the skills of hundreds of gifted journalists who have attempted to uncover them:
Who exactly was running the country these last eight years?
What did the president know, if anything, and when did he know it, if ever?
Was he capable in any way of even one sleepless night, much less the ongoing insomnia that any sentient person would suffer after so many wrong decisions and pointless deaths?
Did he mispronounce the word “nuclear” (1) on purpose, in order to make himself seem folksy, (2) because he actually thought he was pronouncing it correctly, or (3) just to piss us off?
The exit appearances that Bush has made in recent weeks will be something future presidents will refer to as often as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, although for different reasons. Here’s what he said:
We did the best we could under the circumstances.
It’s not easy being president.
It wasn’t completely my fault.
Everyone makes mistakes.
I kept America safe, except for this one time.
After that one time I worked really, really hard almost every day and had to read a lot of stuff about foreign countries.
This is Bush’s legacy—a stunning series of alibis. This is what he will crawl off to Texas with, hoping that it will fool a publisher into giving him a substantial book advance and contributors into giving him money for a library full of pilfered papers.
On Monday, w
e will have to get used to a different thing entirely, a president who’s in the loop, who reads history, who speaks decent English. He will rob us of something—of the burning anger that has sustained us the last eight years—and that will take some adjusting to. But we’re up for it; after all these years in the dark, we’re ready for a little overestimation. Which is, unlike “misunderestimation,” an actual word. But come to think of it, “misunderestimation” ought to be a word. I certainly know what it means.
—January 16, 2009
Personal
The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less
If I can just get back to New York, I’ll be fine
I’m five years old. We’ve just moved from New York to Los Angeles, and I’m outside, at a playground, at my new school on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. The sunlight dapples through the trees, and happy laughing blond children surround me. All I can think is, What am I doing here?
What my mother said
My mother says these words at least five hundred times in the course of my growing up: “Everything is copy.”
She also says, “Never ever buy a red coat.”
What my teacher said
My high school journalism teacher, whose name is Charles O. Simms, is teaching us to write a lead—the first sentence or paragraph of a newspaper story. He writes the words “Who What Where When Why and How” on the blackboard. Then he dictates a set of facts to us that goes something like this: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago.” We all sit at our typewriters and write a lead, most of us inverting the set of facts so that they read something like this, “Anthropologist Margaret Mead and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the faculty Thursday in Sacramento at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal of the high school Kenneth L. Peters announced today.” We turn in our leads. We’re very proud. Mr. Simms looks at what we’ve done and then tosses everything into the garbage. He says: “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school Thursday.’ ” An electric lightbulb turns itself on in the balloon over my head. I decide at this moment that I am going to be a journalist. A few months later I enter a citywide contest to write an essay in fifty words or less on why I want to be a journalist. I win first prize, two tickets to the world premiere of a Doris Day movie.
